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Special offer for OCR members only! $10 off and $10 of each sale gets donated to the site! Click here to get the Kontakt 2/EXS/Halion version, and here for the Reason version.

I'm proud to announce that the newest Impact Soundworks sample library, Groove Bias: Vintage Drum Sounds, is officially available at a special price for OC ReMix members! Not only are bustatunez and I offering this sound collection at a discount, but for every copy we sell we'll donate $10 to OCR. Just remember to use the purchase links in THIS POST. We've spent over half a year working on this collection and we're really proud of the final result - but don't take our word for it... read on for more info + demos.

The goal of this project was to create a set of deeply sampled acoustic drumkits inspired by classic 50s, 60s and 70s records and the timeless breakbeats we all know and love. For decades, these sounds have been imitated and sampled over and over, but many producers have preferred to try and capture old kits with pristine, modern recording methods. Not so with this library. Our motto was "the more tubes, the better," and we armed ourselves to the teeth with beat-up mics, analog gear, vintage drums and tape machines.

Key Features:

* Three custom drum kits and a set of percussion recorded at three separate studios

* Only classic kits, gear, mics and techniques used for a true vintage sound.

* Intensive sampling - a minimum of 5 RRs and 5 velos per kit part, up to 10 RRs and 16 velos!

* Full kit patches AND individual components so you can construct your own Frankenstein kits.

* Custom scripted patches for Kontakt and combis in NN-XT.

* Intuitive GM mapping for compatibility with any project or MIDI.

* Simplified mixing; designed with a great sound right out of the box.

* Additional overhead/room patches for user-controllable ambiance.

* A total of five snares, four kicks, nine toms, three hats (closed, loose, open, pedal), two rides, two crashes, two splashes, two rims, handclaps, tambourine, shaker, agogo, bongos, woodblocks, cowbell and triangle!

A little about the kits...

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"Superfreak" (Milkboy Studios, Ardmore, PA) - As the name suggests, most of this 60s Ludwig 'Silver Comet' kit is rumored to have originally belonged to a certain funk music icon. The drums were recorded using high-end ribbon mics into an all-analog signal path, most notably a 70s Neve console with a few busted channels and lots of character. Outboard processors in the chain included gear by Empirical Labs, Tube-Tech, and Anthony DeMaria Labs. The saturation present on the higher velocities of some of the sounds, like the kick and snare, came solely from high gain running through all the tubes; no overdrive, distortion, or compressor saturation was applied!

"Tape" (The Audio Lab, Milville, NJ) - This one was a real hybrid, the centerpiece being a 30s Ludwig Pioneer Black Beauty snare. The kicks and toms were Tamburo original series, along with an extra 22" Tama kick. Our hats, cymbals and rides were a mishmash of faded, junked up old metal… just what we wanted. Everything in the kit was recorded through an analog signal path then finally to an authentic, 24-track Otari tape machine before being dumped into Pro Tools. Mics used for this kit ranged in age and manufacturer. Various workhorse mics from EV, Sennheiser, Shure and Audix were used throughout, and to get the trashy, crunchy room sound, we used a trashy 70s General Electric cassette recorder mic along with an RCA SK-30.

"Herodotus" (Real Music Media, Minneapolis, MN)) - John Gump (a.k.a. KVRAudio member Herodotus) recorded this drum set, which is the same make and model as Cream drummer Ginger Baker's drums! Mics used were a pair of Neumann KM-184s and Sennheiser 441s plus a Royer R-121. All of this went into some serious outboard gear like a classic UA 1176, Manley Labs VOXBOX, UA 2-610S and Manley Vari-Mu before finally going to a TASCAM reel-to-reel tape machine to seal the deal.

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You can purchase Groove Bias today for a special OCR price of $89 (KT/Hal/EXS) or $79 (NNXT) via PayPal: make sure to use these links as they're for OCR members only!

10% of each sale will be donated to OCR! You'll receive your download link within 24 hours (usually much faster.) While you're waiting, check out the PDF product manual and the video/audio demos below!

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Dunno if you're joking or not, but every format of the library will have "unlocked" WAVs that you can do whatever you want with. My question is mainly directed towards the sample *programming* format, ie. Battery, NN-XT, Ultrabeat, etc...

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I'm having tons of fun testing out Groove Bias in Kontakt, but I'm sure you know what format I'd love to see: SFZ! Give all the folks out there who want high quality drums samples but can't yet afford a high quality sampler a chance

I even did a little research for ya. I ran a quick conversion of a Groove Bias kit from Kontakt to SFZ format using the demo of Extreme Sample Converter (with the files stored as .ogg for superjoe30 ) and in 60 seconds the default settings did a good job of preserving everything except release timings. I'm playing it in SFZ and the sample converter even got the round robins right. Hopefully there's some setting that would give a 100% faithful conversion, but if release times are the only problem, sfzEd is a graphical editor that should (never used it myself) make modifying the release envelopes easier than using a text editor.

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Dude, I've been playing with this for a while, it's killer! I'm thoroughly impressed by this library, mainly because it sounds good out of the box (or out of the .rar archive... so to speak...) and yet still has headroom for my own effects and processing (a big FUCK YOU to EZdrummer in that regard...)

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Sounds great! Finally got around listening to the Impact: Steel demos too, I thought it was a great concept and the demos sound very good. I need enlightenment: what does "deep sampling" mean in this context?

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It just means we recorded a lot of hits. For example, every single part of the library has a bare minimum of five velocity layers and five round robins, while some parts, like the snares, have ten round robins and eleven or more velocity layers. That's a LOT of samples

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"Superfreak" (Milkboy Studios, Ardmore, PA) - As the name suggests, most of this 60s Ludwig 'Silver Comet' kit is rumored to have originally belonged to a certain funk music icon. The drums were recorded using high-end ribbon mics into an all-analog signal path, most notably a 70s Neve console with a few busted channels and lots of character. Outboard processors in the chain included gear by Empirical Labs, Tube-Tech, and Anthony DeMaria Labs. The saturation present on the higher velocities of some of the sounds, like the kick and snare, came solely from high gain running through all the tubes; no overdrive, distortion, or compressor saturation was applied!

"Tape" (The Audio Lab, Milville, NJ) - This one was a real hybrid, the centerpiece being a 30s Ludwig Pioneer Black Beauty snare. The kicks and toms were Tamburo original series, along with an extra 22" Tama kick. Our hats, cymbals and rides were a mishmash of faded, junked up old metal… just what we wanted. Everything in the kit was recorded through an analog signal path then finally to an authentic, 24-track Otari tape machine before being dumped into Pro Tools. Mics used for this kit ranged in age and manufacturer. Various workhorse mics from EV, Sennheiser, Shure and Audix were used throughout, and to get the trashy, crunchy room sound, we used a trashy 70s General Electric cassette recorder mic along with an RCA SK-30.

"Herodotus" (Real Music Media, Minneapolis, MN)) - John Gump (a.k.a. KVRAudio member Herodotus) recorded this drum set, which is the same make and model as Cream drummer Ginger Baker's drums! Mics used were a pair of Neumann KM-184s and Sennheiser 441s plus a Royer R-121. All of this went into some serious outboard gear like a classic UA 1176, Manley Labs VOXBOX, UA 2-610S and Manley Vari-Mu before finally going to a TASCAM reel-to-reel tape machine to seal the deal.

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Round robins are basically multiple samples on the same key at the same velocity level. So, you can hit velocity 127 five times in a row and hear five different recordings. This makes samples, particularly drums, a lot more realistic because otherwise, even with a lot of velocity levels, something like a hat pattern or snare roll will sound like a 'machine gun' and not a realistic performance.